Marijuana, Colorado, Legalization: Exploring the Language of /r/trees

Every subculture has a set of commonly used words and phrases. Pot culture is no different. I believe it’s this common language that brings us closer together. In this quick study I wanted to explore the language used within online marijuana communities.

Subject

Perhaps one of the largest pot communities is /r/trees, a subreddit dedicated to cannabis. I wanted to know what words were used most frequently, so here’s what I did:

Data

I analyzed the 500 most popular posts. I narrow the post listings down to the top posts of all time. Next, I copied and pasted each title into a word document. The words were then pasted into worditout to generate a word cloud. This provided a visualization of the word frequency.

Thoughts

It’s no surprise that ‘marijuana’ took an overwhelming lead.

Several states made it onto the cloud (Colorado & Maine), but I was surprised that California didn’t make the list. Luckily, the word ‘state’ did make it.

I think /r/trees wants weed to be legal. I found legalization, legal, legalized, legalizing, and legalize made it to the cloud.

There are 2 (with an extra variation) gender specific words and they are all male oriented – guy(s) and dad

I’m very pleased to see ‘Snoop’ made the list.

There are a ton of other interesting words in the cloud; however, I’m going to just let you explore it on your own. If you see anything interesting let me know in the comment section at the bottom of the page. Thanks!